Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Monday, January 07, 2013

McCain's Long War on Hagel

Unseen
in the cloud of preemptive dust over the nomination for Secretary of Defense is
more than a decade of fallout from a friendship with John McCain that broke apart
into bitterness.

Chuck
Hagel had supported the fellow Vietnam veteran’s run for president in 2000 but
then angered his Senate colleague to the point that McCain, moving to the
Neo-Con Right, approvingly posted on his own web site a Los Angeles Times article of March 3, 2001 (months before 9/11)
headlined “On Iraq, GOP Split Over Gaining World Respect or Enforcing It.”

It
read: “Hagel has repeatedly warned that the United States must disarm Iraq in a
way that reinforces international alliances...McCain has become the champion of
the hard-line neoconservative thinkers who want to move quickly against Iraq,
no matter how many countries agree...

“In
all, while Hagel argues that broadening international cooperation is the key to
security in this new era, McCain believes ‘credibility’ in delivering military
force is the top priority. The one is focused on winning respect, the other
believes in enforcing it.”

A
year and a half later, as the Bush Administration prepared to invade Iraq, Hagel
called Chief of Staff Andy Card to ask why the President would consider going
to war “without Congress being with him?” As a result, Hagel later revealed, “a
few of us--Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I--were invited to discussions with the
White House...

“Finally,
begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was
astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region...Sure as hell it was
clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything they wanted.”

Hagel,
Biden and Lugar “had to rewrite it...stripped the language the White House had
set up and put our language in it.” That was what Congress approved.

More
than a decade later, GOP elephants who never forget are piling on Hagel for his
party sin of being a premature opponent of Bush’s war, which later morphed into
McCain’s.

Whatever
the merits of side issues such as a Hagel remark about Israel and another about
gays, a serious Senate confirmation process will have to take account of his
courage and tenacity over Iraq that proved to be as right as McCain was wrong.

Barack
Obama was in the Senate then too and observed Hagel’s qualities up close. His
action today bears witness to what he saw and why he wants McCain's nemesis with him as his second term starts.